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Raph Levien

@raphlinus.bsky.social
968 followers 105 following 119 posts

Doing fundamental research in UI and 2D graphics

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
A huge milestone: Fearless SIMD 1.0 is published: linebender.org/blog/fearles.... This was a real collaboration, thanks especially to Sergey Davidoff for pushing this over the line, Laurenz Stampfl, Andrew Jakubowicz, valadaptive, Benjamin Saunders, and Daniel McNab.
linebender.org
Fearless SIMD v1.0 is here
Fearless SIMD v1.0 is here
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I just posted a blog post on my hyperbezier curve: linebender.org/blog/hyperbe... I've actually been working on this for years, and only recently figured out a solution to the parameter mapping problem. I think this curve is potentially better than cubic Béziers for 2D vector graphic design.
A plot of two roughly S-shaped curves. In gray is a cubic Bézier, and the Bézier control points are shown. In blue is an example of the hyperbezier, with roughly similar shape but much smoother curvature variation. There is also a "curvature comb" in green.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
There's a lot here worth thinking about, and it puts in words some of the feelings I was having that motivated me to leave Google. I'm *also* quite worried about more direct autocratic control of US-based AI, there are signs of this starting to happen.
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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...
moultano.wordpress.com
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You
An atlas of the vibrance of the real world
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Mara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Just like last year, we replaced a whole wall of movie posters with our own punny movie posters at the cinema where RustWeek 2026 took place. I designed seven new posters for this year's event. See the thread below 👇
Nine movie posters displayed next to each other.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
I will be at RustWeek in Utrecht next week! Really looking forward to meeting people.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
As a fun project, I implemented race-the-beam image decompression on RP2350 with DVI output. I can get 1280x720 at 60Hz with a bit of overclocking. PR at github.com/DusterTheFir... I'll probably write this up, the idea is pretty cool.
A photo of a monitor, which displays a high quality photo of a yellow flower, as well as the board that drives the display, an Adafruit RP2350 feather. Also in the frame is a small Ferris plushy toy, and the right edge of a laptop, which displays the assembly language code for the image decompression algorithm.
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Saltstone Studios ⚓️The Hearth and Harbour⚓️ @saltstonestudios.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
Our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour is fully 2D, but with some neat tricks we’ve made it look 3D. Ethan, our environment artist, did this with a special type of texture called a Normal Map. (Thread! 1/7)
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Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
sebastianaaltonen.com
No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen
Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
As we go into the holiday season, there's lots of progress in Linebender from the previous month: linebender.org/blog/tmil-23/. Among other things, blur filters in Vello CPU (with GPU acceleration on the roadmap), SIMD progress, and a new port of Runebender to Xilem.
linebender.org
Linebender in November 2025
Linebender in November 2025
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
This is indeed an excellent talk, and I think contains the seeds of a path forward through the AI thicket. When tested against only "vibes," AI can generate reams of slop. But when tested against hard ground truth, in this case rigorous mathematical formalism, possibilities abound.
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Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik.com · 13/11/2025
“We adopted #rustlang for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density ... with Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.” security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...
security.googleblog.com
Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in ...
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
My talk on "I want a good parallel language" is now up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eV... Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation... Thanks Arthur Gleckler and BALISP for hosting the talk!
youtube.com
I Want a Good Parallel Language, by Raph Levien (BALISP)
YouTube video by Arthur Gleckler
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
I'm thrilled that Laurenz Stampfl, a student at ETH Zurich, has completed his Masters degree, and has published the thesis: ethz.ch/content/dam/... 1/2
ethz.ch
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
I'll be giving at talk tomorrow at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, entitled "I want a good parallel language." Meetup link is here: www.meetup.com/balisp/event...
meetup.com
I Want a Good Parallel Language, RetroAI, lightning talks, and socializing, Sat, Nov 1, 2025, 12:00 PM | Meetup
Hello, hacker ladies and gentlemen! On Saturday, November 1st, we'll have a talk by [Raph Levien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Levien), who is an expert in Rust and
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 22/10/2025
There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...
techpolicy.press
Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks | TechPolicy.Press
The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Some updates from the Linebender ecosystem: we've published our monthly update blog (linebender.org/blog/tmil-21/), and also released fearless_simd 0.3.0 (github.com/linebender/f...). The train keeps rolling!
linebender.org
Linebender in September 2025
Linebender in September 2025
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
I gave a seminar entitled "How Rust won: The quest for performant, reliable software" at the Topos Institute on Jun 3, and the video (youtu.be/k_-6KI3m31M) is now published. I hope people enjoy it!
youtu.be
[Berkeley Seminar] Raph Levien | How Rust won: the quest for performant, reliable software
YouTube video by Topos Institute
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
We have our usual monthly update for Linebender: linebender.org/blog/tmil-19/ A lot of good progress, especially on the renderer, and fearless_simd is coming along well. Also some personal news: I'm leaving Google and taking a new role at Canva, moving to Australia in January.
linebender.org
Linebender in July 2025
Linebender in July 2025
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Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Cool to see this work happening, and look forward to some nice GPU compute acceleration for path rendering!
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Topnotch reporting from Marisa Kabas on a very important topic. It's maddening that mainstream news sources are not meeting the moment. Support independent journalism by subscribing.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Last week I did a research retreat on stroke expansion yielding a cubic Bézier approximation. It went well. I wrote a summary: docs.google.com/document/d/1... That document requires a certain amount of context and background to understand fully, but hopefully some people will find it interesting.
docs.google.com
Research retreat 2025-06-16 summary
Research retreat 2025-06-16 summary I did a research retreat week focused on cubic-to-cubic stroke expansion. Overall I made lots of progress on both practical and theoretical issues, but the problem ...
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RustNL @rustnl.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Faster, easier 2D vector rendering by Raph Levien at RustWeek 2025! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... @raphlinus.bsky.social‬ #rustlang #RustWeek
youtube.com
Faster, easier 2D vector rendering - Raph Levien
This talk presents new work on high performance vector path and text rendering, to make it not only fast but easier to integrate with other code. Multiple mo...
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
My talk is in here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... Enjoy!
youtube.com
Faster, easier 2D vector rendering - Raph Levien
YouTube video by RustNL
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
I wrote linebender.org/blog/a-plan-... and published it over the weekend. I'm excited about pushing Rust SIMD to be more usable, and open to feedback about the specifics of the proposal.
linebender.org
A plan for SIMD
A plan for SIMD
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Trifecta Tech Foundation @trifectatech.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Our data compression projects aim to offer best-in-class performance. @tweedegolf.bsky.social‬'s Folkert de Vries shows how SIMD helps us to speed up zlib-rs in compare256, a crucial part of the compression algorithm that finds repetitions in the input. trifectatech.org/blog/simd-in... #rustlang
trifectatech.org
SIMD in zlib-rs (part 2): compare256 - Trifecta Tech Foundation
In part 1 of the "SIMD in zlib-rs" series, we've seen that, with a bit of nudging, autovectorization can produce optimal code for some problems.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
This hits close to home. The PhET people are brilliant and dedicated, and we've shared ideas and some code on 2D rendering technology. One tiny facet of a great loss.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 29/03/2025
New blog post up on the state of SIMD in Rust: linebender.org/blog/towards... It's an update on my previous blog post from 7 years ago, and also links to a podcast I recently recorded with Andre Popovitch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Wc.... I think it's a good intro to SIMD, and I had fun doing it.
linebender.org
Towards fearless SIMD, 7 years later
Towards fearless SIMD, 7 years later
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
I've now published my blog post, "I want a good parallel computer." raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2025/03/... . Thanks much to all the feedback on the draft, I'd like to think I've clarified some things that might have been confusing.
raphlinus.github.io
I want a good parallel computer
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those...
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
New blog post up on the Rust font loader now shipping in Chrome. I only had a small part in this personally but am proud of the team's work. developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-...
developer.chrome.com
Memory safety for web fonts  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers
Learn how and why the Chrome team has replaced FreeType with Skrifa.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
I'm working on a blog post "I want a good parallel computer", have a draft up (github.com/raphlinus/ra...), and am very open to criticism before I publish more widely. Feel free to respond here, comment on the PR, or contact me privately.
github.com
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
Really looking forward to seeing you in Utrecht if you can make it.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
I have a talk in RustWeek on developments in Vello to make 2D vector path rendering easier to integrate into other applications. Hope to see you in Utrecht!
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 16/02/2025
This is Enkhuizen beach when I visited there in 2013. It's the town in the Netherlands where I was born, something I've been thinking about lately. I have other beach photos of Maui (family was there recently) and Costa Rica, but today this is my choice.
A photograph taken of Enkhuizerstrand (Enkhuizen beach in the Netherlands) in October 2013. The sand is in the lower left, and the waterline is a strong diagonal. Trees are in the distance, and the sky is cloudy. Two people are walking along the beach, very small figures in the composition.
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 11/02/2025
I wrote about the thing I am looking for to make sense of the moment so that I can stop posting about it. (First post on my personal site in some time.) erinkissane.com/against-entr...
erinkissane.com
Against Entropy - Erin Kissane's small internet website
What I am doing during the explosive disassembly of the US administrative state and what I want, and why.
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danah boyd @zephoria.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Many of us are aghast at the unprecedented dismantlement of the US administrative state. All around me, people are trying to connect what’s happening to historical events. Here's my attempt to offer a few possible frames for sense-making right now: www.zephoria.org/thoughts/arc...
A commissioned image from artist Pawel Kuczynski depicting the American flag as a series of pipes leaking data with workers trying to repair it.
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Gen Michael Hayden @genmhayden.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Fellow NSA - National Security Agency veterans. Look at what’s happened at the National Cryptologic Museum. They covered up with brown paper the photos of Women in American Cryptology. All in response to President Trump’s anti-diversity executive order.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
December was vacation time for many of us (myself included), but Linebender did impressive work on a number of fronts: releases of the Color and Peniko crates, progress on text layout and the masonry widget set, and a new Kompari crate for image comparison. Read more at linebender.org/blog/tmil-12/
linebender.org
Linebender in December 2024
Linebender in December 2024
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
I put a list of color resources onto the Linebender wiki: linebender.org/wiki/color-r.... I think it's a good set, but don't claim it's exhaustive, so if you've got more, please add them to the wiki.
linebender.org
Color resources
Color resources
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
crates.io/crates/color 0.1 is now published. There's support for all the predefined color spaces in CSS Color Level 4, some cool gradient math, and more. I'm excited where this will go.
crates.io
crates.io: Rust Package Registry
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
Linebender in October is now published: linebender.org/blog/tmix-10/ . The big news is that resvg has moved into the Linebender organization. In the short term, our goal is to keep the maintenance of the project going, including related crates. As part of the migration, we're relicensing from... 1/2
linebender.org
Linebender in October 2024: resvg stewardship
Linebender in October 2024: resvg stewardship
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 05/11/2024
I'm on a social media fast, which is why you haven't heard much from me, but I did want to share one cool thing. Our stuff has been 8-bit RGB for a while, but it's clear that's not going to cut it in an HDR world. Inspired by bevy_color, I've started a color crate: github.com/linebender/c...
github.com
GitHub - linebender/color: Color in Rust.
Color in Rust. Contribute to linebender/color development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 27/07/2024
A video of the GPU stroke expansion paper at HPG 2024 is up: youtu.be/qPmwbp7A3BQ?... I'm happy with the way it turned out, and there's some interesting Q&A at the end also.
youtu.be
HPG 2024: Day 1 - July 26th
Full program: https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/2024/program/
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 26/07/2024
I'll be presenting our paper on GPU-friendly stroke expansion with Arman Uguray at HPG 2024 today in Denver. We've put together a landing page with a 40 second "fast forward video," a link to the paper, and a fun interactive demo (written in Rust, based on xilem_web). linebender.org/gpu-stroke-e...
linebender.org
GPU-friendly Stroke Expansion
GPU-friendly Stroke Expansion
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 11/07/2024
I've just put together a 40 second "fast forward" video for our High Performance Graphics talk later this month: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkeq... The animations were all hand-coded in Rust and rendered in Vello in real time. It feels like a preview of the power to support high-powered creative tools.
youtube.com
GPU-Friendly Stroke Expansion
A 40 second "fast forward" video for our High Performance Graphics paper on GPU-Friendly Stroke Expansion.The paper will be presented at High Performance Gra...
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 08/05/2024
I'll be giving my talk on Xilem at #rustnl2024 this afternoon (14:40 CEST). It'll be on the conference livestream: 2024.rustnl.org/live/ There'll be a lot to present. Among other things, we did the 0.1 release of Xilem last night. Things are moving!
2024.rustnl.org
🔴 Live - RustNL 2024
RustNL 2024, The Netherlands - May 7 & 8 2024
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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 02/05/2024
A major project I've been working on for many months is rendering vector graphics strokes on GPU. @armansito and I recently wrote a paper on our techniques, and it's now available on arXiv (and also submitted to a relevant conference): arxiv.org/abs/2405.00127. Fingers crossed it gets accepted!
arxiv.org
GPU-friendly Stroke Expansion
Vector graphics includes both filled and stroked paths as the main primitives. While there are many techniques for rendering filled paths on GPU, stroked paths have proved more elusive. This paper...
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